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Good Day, Everyone!
Many of you may be wondering what exactly is cosmology other than scientists’ equations and their interpretations. I realize more every day that I, and maybe you too, have chosen a philosophy so vast in its coverage of all sciences and current global affairs, we’re boggled to keep up! More scientific discoveries have accumulated in the last one hundred years than in all scientific endeavor.
The following introductory notes by Brian Swimme, mathematical cosmologist at California Institute of Integral Studies, help balance my feelings on the scales of reason regarding our world at-large.
“In 1543 Copernicus announced to a startled Europe that the Earth was not stationary, but was sailing rapidly through space as it spun around the Sun. This was difficult news to take in all at once, but over time the Europeans reinvented their entire civilization in light of this strange new fact about the Universe. The fundamental institutions of the medieval world, including the monarchies, the church, the feudal economic system, and the medieval sense of self, melted away as a radically different civilization was constructed.
“We live in a similar moment of breakdown and creativity. The cosmological discovery that shatters nearly everything upon which the modern age was built is the discovery that the Universe came into existence 13.7 billion years ago and is so biased toward complexification that life and intelligence are now seen to be a nearly inevitable construction of evolutionary dynamics. Our new challenge is to reinvent our civilization. The major institutions of the modern period, including that of agriculture and religion and education and economics, need to be re-imagined within an intelligent, self-organizing, living Universe, so that instead of degrading the Earth’s life systems, humanity might learn to join the enveloping community of living beings in a mutually enhancing manner. This great work will surely draw upon the talents and energies of many millions of humans from every culture
of our planet and throughout the rest of the 21st century.”
~ Brian Swimme dot org
Swimme’s heralding the evolving ‘great work’ is Staying Awake’s proclamation, too. Actually, I think you and I are already participating in the great work, even though we might be wishing we were still asleep. Nonetheless, we’re very much curious about all things forthcoming, and it’s likely every one of us wakes up each morning wondering what happened on every continent while we were sleeping overnight—that’s our cosmology showing up! ¹
Fewer and Fewer Secrets
There have been millenniums in which human populations’ cosmologies were very quickly and forcibly altered, or very gradually directed this way or that for pleasures of males. It’s been too easy for rulers and warlords to manufacture delusions distracting humans from the very source of their natural natures—the living Universe.
Innocent and unknowing Earthlings forgot the delusions were made up. Then, and up to this very day, we live inside a ‘ruling group mind,’ an unconscious complicity as ruling males continue to force citizenries’ realities to conform. As continents of civilizations are reinvented by the regulators of secrets, prepare for flurries of truth as fewer and fewer secrets are concealed.
Absorbed in blazes of commerce,
Awakened by instants of truth
Descending surely and loudly upon us
As whispers in falling snowflakes.
© David Moorhead
Ancestral ruling families and their financiers can predict citizenries’ denials and projections within the continuance of rulers’ psychical programs. The rulers know that too many of us witness delusions within the males’ worlds of lobbyists, hierarchical administrative bureaucracies in central banks, globalizations, and religious demagogueries.
More times than not, women are simply more honest and intuitive while continuing to suffer unethical men too much.
Puzzle Pieces
Here is the start of putting countless pieces into a mammoth puzzle, helping us imagine and stay curious about information and technologies. If we Earthlings aren’t driven from our senses by current modes of government, with civil enforcements of religious fundamentals, we might have a chance of being conscious during evolvements in this century’s reinvention of civilizations!
Here’s one puzzle piece. Women, as arbitrators and policy makers, are already replacing, one by one, ensconced delusional elements that began some eight thousand years ago. Hold onto your hats as winds of change gust further into this decade and beyond: exclusively manly secrets and unethical codes of conduct will be unconcealed to allow more education, health care, and physical protection for women and children.
Here’s another piece. Many Earthlings now know more secrets in esoteric realms. Perhaps you were reared like me, having been trained with strict religious dogma strongly disparaging any subjects assumed esoteric. Our uneducated parents and teachers believed esoteric held secrets that equaled evil. But, I’ll eventually get over that after hearing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology panel forum in which one speaker inferred esoteric as such: the most current information and structures created to produce social software on Internet. Refer Collaboration and Collective Intelligence, MIT video index.
And another. Exoteric knowledge (ascertained by anyone; public, outer reality) and esoteric knowledge (ascertained from one’s inner reality; ancient and medieval secrets for only elitists or the highly educated and influential) are blending. For those of us willing to stay awake to all things intuitive and futuristic, blends of exoteric with current esoteric knowledge cause many of us to get savvy about worlds unimagined while playing in the metaverse. ²
Still another puzzle piece. Geeks and experts; academics, writers, and journalists are brushing upon those of us without those credentials, yet who are studying and exchanging comments on Internet. It’s a humongous puzzle party of creations and opinions and ideas and education!
Citizens, not Consumers
It appears a commanding piece of the global puzzle is consumption. Educators and professionals are already working to help reform the system that some sixty thousand lobbyists in Washington D.C. yet know how to stop, or want to. Enormous lobbyists’ pressures and rugged competitions within and between corporations have submerged democracy, but not without the help of us, the consumptive citizenry during the last sixty years. It’s a compelling retraining for us USA citizens to remember we are politically powerful, not just consumers of goods and services.
“The system as we now have it, as it is moving completely out of control, anyone’s control; the system will not reform itself from the inside. There are too many people in Washington, too many lobbyists, too many office holders, who have a stake in the system just as it is. And so, my bottom line is that the only way we are going to save capitalism from itself, save us as consumers and investors from ourselves, and reassert our citizenship values is if we have a true citizenship movement. […]
“Nothing good will happen; we will not have affordable health care; we will not have a major change in climate regulation and environmental regulation to avoid climate change; we will not have any major policies that reduce inequality. In fact, if anything, we’ll have widening inequality—all of this—unless we get our democracy back. Getting our democracy back is the number one objective and must be the number one objective for anybody who is at all concerned about the reform of our society in any dimension. […]
“Corporations are not people; they are pieces of paper; they are contractual relationships. When we moralize, when we scold corporations […], we are indulging in an anthropomorphic fallacy. Corporations are not people; they should not be treated as citizens; they should not have rights under the Constitution; they should not have representation in our congress; they have no legitimate reason for being in Washington. Only people are citizens; only people should inhabit our democracy. This is not a country by and from and for the corporation. It is a country of citizens, who need to reassert their citizenship. […]
“[T]here is no substitute for laws and rules that require companies to play a game the way that we as citizens think the game ought to be played. To turn our back on democracy, to thumb our nose at it, to hold our nose when we talk about politics, is to give up the game, entirely. We can reassert our citizenship, and, we must.”
~ Robert Bernard Reich (b 1946), professor at University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security; refer Commonwealth Club dot org, transcribed from audio recorded September 18, 2007.
A Complex of Stuff
With possibilities of USA residents reasserting citizenship, an inevitable global cosmology could evolve without staggering quantities in a complex of stuff we citizens discard. You’ll possibly be amazed, then shudder, once you see Chris Jordan’s digital photographic artistry. During the first phase of developing his social statement in art, he couldn’t find any piles of only one particular product, which we consume and toss in massive quantities. Since then, Chris expanded his reference to depict our consumption that, as a nation, is gargantuan, and so are the sizes of the photos in elegant galleries. ³
“Exploring around our country’s shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress. I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.
“The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.
“As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.”
~ Chris Jordan dot com; video presentation Bill Moyers’ Journal
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